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Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
So, how are you doing
00:00:25 ►
today hopefully you aren’t too tightly connected to your television set because
00:00:30 ►
the screw heads who are pretending to run this country are doing their best to
00:00:34 ►
convince everybody that the sky is falling luckily for us fellow salon or
00:00:40 ►
Patrick T hasn’t panicked but instead sent us some of his hard-earned cash,
00:00:45 ►
which is definitely going to be used to keep the psychedelic salon coming your way each week.
00:00:51 ►
So thanks for your donation, Patrick. It’s greatly appreciated.
00:00:55 ►
And Patrick also sent a message that is similar to quite a few emails that come in each week.
00:01:01 ►
Here’s part of what he said.
00:01:03 ►
Lorenzo, thank you for the
00:01:05 ►
Psychedelic Salon. It is really such a treasure trove of information. I’ve been listening every
00:01:10 ►
day on my commute. I just attended the Horizons Conference in New York on inspiration from
00:01:16 ►
listening to the Salon. It was great. I heard Alex and Allison Gray and Encyclopedia Pictura
00:01:22 ►
and was really inspired. My interest is in psychedelic art, research, and therapy, Thank you. might go about finding local information on that? How one might go about researching specific
00:01:45 ►
therapists? Can you help me or give me some general ideas? I really wish I could, Patrick,
00:01:51 ►
but finding the others, particularly in the climate of fear that we are immersed in these days,
00:01:58 ►
well, it isn’t easy. To begin with, most people are afraid to even stand up and be honest about
00:02:04 ►
how they feel about psychedelic medicines.
00:02:07 ►
I know that when I was still caught in the web of corporate America, that I seldom voiced my opinion on these matters.
00:02:13 ►
Yet, once I did start to make little statements here and there, I was very pleasantly surprised at how quickly the others found me.
00:02:21 ►
Now, as to finding people who are still providing psychedelic psychotherapy,
00:02:26 ►
that’s extremely difficult,
00:02:28 ►
mainly because anyone providing these important and valuable services
00:02:32 ►
is not only risking their career, they’re also risking imprisonment.
00:02:37 ►
Now, the good news is that thanks to the impressive work
00:02:40 ►
that Michael and Annie Mithoffer and their staff has been doing
00:02:44 ►
on the study of MDMA
00:02:45 ►
as a tool to be used to help
00:02:48 ►
people recover from traumas such
00:02:50 ►
as rape and war.
00:02:52 ►
Well, it looks like they may receive
00:02:54 ►
approval for a much larger study
00:02:56 ►
in the not too distant future.
00:02:57 ►
And there are some other possibilities
00:03:00 ►
for expanding psychedelic studies.
00:03:02 ►
I know that Charlie Grobe
00:03:04 ►
is planning on expanding his work on psilocybin,
00:03:07 ►
using it to alleviate anxiety associated with cancer
00:03:11 ►
and other possibly terminal diseases.
00:03:14 ►
So we should all be looking out for news of these and other studies
00:03:18 ►
that are gradually gaining a little traction in the research community.
00:03:22 ►
I wish I could give you a better answer than that, Patrick,
00:03:26 ►
but for now, that’s about all we have to go on.
00:03:28 ►
But thanks again for the donations, and particularly for your kind words.
00:03:33 ►
It’s always nice to hear from fellow slaughters who thank me for the podcast.
00:03:37 ►
Even though I’ve pretty much had to give up responding to email,
00:03:41 ►
I do make a point of reading everything that comes in.
00:03:43 ►
And I’m here to tell you that all of your kind words are very much appreciated. Thank you. Robert Anton Wilson Yes, I did more or less cut Bob off when the first side of the tape came to an end.
00:04:25 ►
But the good news is that it actually did come at a good point,
00:04:28 ►
because he completely changed the topic and began talking about extending human lifespan to several centuries.
00:04:36 ►
As usual, I’ve got a few things to say about that myself,
00:04:40 ►
but first let’s join Robert Anton Wilson sometime back in 1986, I believe,
00:04:45 ►
and hear what he was thinking back then about how long we humans might be able to live if all goes according to plan.
00:04:56 ►
So, as human lifespan has been increasing from the beginning,
00:05:00 ►
and now we’re learning how to change intelligence too,
00:05:03 ►
it should not come as a big shock
00:05:05 ►
that there are a lot of researchers saying how far can human lifespan be extended and nobody knows
00:05:11 ►
because the research is just in its infancy but already there have been spectacular successes
00:05:17 ►
with experimental animals the age of experimental rats has been doubled in one experiment the age
00:05:24 ►
of fish has been tripled in another experiment.
00:05:27 ►
But if we had the immunological system at 80 that we have at 20, we might live 200 years, 500 years, nobody knows.
00:05:36 ►
There have been predictions by researchers in the field that lifespan can be extended to 500 years.
00:05:41 ►
Others have predicted to 1,000 years.
00:05:44 ►
And then an interesting
00:05:45 ►
factor enters the equation. If lifespan can be extended to even 140 years, to take a conservative
00:05:51 ►
figure, just doubling what it is now, and remember what it is now is already doubled what it was
00:05:56 ►
before the French Revolution, if it could be extended to 140 years, then everybody who would ordinarily die in 70 years will be around for 140 years.
00:06:09 ►
That means, in the case of most of us, we’ll be around for over 100 years more of scientific
00:06:15 ►
investigation into longevity. With 100 years more investigation, who knows what breakthroughs could
00:06:21 ►
happen. Maybe we will learn how to transfer consciousness into silicon.
00:06:26 ►
If we could find a way to translate the structure of my brain into silicon chips,
00:06:31 ►
then my consciousness would be in the silicon chips,
00:06:34 ►
and since silicon is potentially immortal, I would be immortal.
00:06:38 ►
Is that science fiction?
00:06:40 ►
Well, the atom bomb was science fiction once.
00:06:42 ►
I remember when I was in high school, I remember a lot of experts saying we’d never be able to reach the moon.
00:06:48 ►
And I remember other experts saying, oh, we can reach the moon, but it will take at least 100 years.
00:06:54 ►
So if you look at the longevity revolution from either a radical or a conservative perspective,
00:07:00 ►
you look at it radically, nobody knows what we might do by the year 2000,
00:07:04 ►
since knowledge is accelerating faster all the time.
00:07:06 ►
Look at it conservatively and say that all we’re going to do is increase lifespan to maybe twice what it is now.
00:07:14 ►
That means we’ll be living through so much more history and so many more breakthroughs that we have no idea how far it can be extended.
00:07:22 ►
It is quite thinkable that there are people in this audience right now
00:07:25 ►
who will never die.
00:07:27 ►
That’s a statement that could never be made before in history.
00:07:32 ►
So as we are moving off the planet and going into space
00:07:35 ►
and lifespan is extending and we’re learning how to change our consciousness,
00:07:39 ►
we are becoming an entirely different species.
00:07:41 ►
But that shouldn’t be too much of a shock.
00:07:43 ►
We became an entirely different species in the way we behave,
00:07:47 ►
the way we related to one another, and in our whole cosmology
00:07:50 ►
when we graduated from being hunters and gatherers
00:07:53 ►
to the stage of the first Bronze Age agricultural civilizations.
00:07:57 ►
And we went through an equally astounding metamorphosis
00:08:00 ►
when we went from the agricultural age to the industrial age.
00:08:04 ►
And we’re already in the process of a tremendous change now as we’re going into the computer age.
00:08:09 ►
Nobody quite knows where it’s taking us,
00:08:11 ►
except it’s taking us to entirely new dimensions of organization and possibility.
00:08:18 ►
Going back to the first amoeboid creatures in the ocean
00:08:22 ►
and their path up to the amphibians and on to the
00:08:26 ►
saurians and onwards to the mammals it has taken four and a half million years to get where we are
00:08:33 ►
now but we’re moving faster all the time the direction of evolution seems very likely to be
00:08:40 ►
that that life is moving to the position where it will be omnipotent,
00:08:47 ►
where life can do anything it wishes to do.
00:08:51 ►
And in general, you can see that even on the surface of a primitive planet like this. From the time life started here, it has spread itself all over the planet,
00:08:55 ►
taking whatever form it has to take to adapt to any condition.
00:09:00 ►
Life has gotten to the top of the Himalayas.
00:09:02 ►
There are life forms up there.
00:09:03 ►
Life has gotten to Little America. Look atalayas. There are life forms up there. Life has gotten to Little America.
00:09:06 ►
Look at the sidewalk closely when you’re taking a walk
00:09:09 ►
and you see little bits of grass coming up between the cracks.
00:09:11 ►
Life has found a way to break through the concrete.
00:09:14 ►
Life seems to have a tremendous Dionysian exuberance about it,
00:09:19 ►
what Nietzsche called a will to power.
00:09:22 ►
And life seems to be aiming at nothing less than the attainment of divinity.
00:09:27 ►
We are in the process, we are part of the process of evolution from amoebas to cosmic immortals.
00:09:35 ►
What are cosmic immortals?
00:09:37 ►
Cosmic immortals are creatures who live anywhere in the universe they damn well please,
00:09:42 ►
travel as fast as they want to, and never die.
00:09:45 ►
That’s the old-fashioned, that’s the idea of a god.
00:09:48 ►
A god goes anywhere, never dies, and moves as fast as a god wants to move.
00:09:52 ►
That is what we are evolving toward gradually.
00:09:56 ►
Most futurists do not make predictions that outrageous
00:09:59 ►
because futurists are trying to become respectable.
00:10:02 ►
Those of you who heard me in Boulder last night know that I have no desire to become respectable. Those of you who heard me in Boulder last night know
00:10:06 ►
that I have no desire to become respectable. I am in a much more dangerous business than that.
00:10:12 ►
I am trying to provoke new thoughts. I have just given you an outline of history and a projection
00:10:17 ►
forward of where I think it’s going. That is my reality tunnel. That is the way I put the facts
00:10:22 ►
together. Anybody here can put the facts together
00:10:25 ►
and make a different gestalt out of them, a different reality tunnel, and make different
00:10:28 ►
projections. As a matter of fact, the Club of Rome is a group of Italian futurists who are very good
00:10:34 ►
at examining the trajectories of history and concluding that in 10 years everything is going
00:10:38 ►
to go smash and the civilization will collapse entirely. Since we don’t know what the future is until the future
00:10:46 ►
gets at us, and the future only comes at us one day at a time, which gives us a chance to adjust
00:10:51 ►
to it. Imagine if it arrived a year at a time. Fortunately, we only have to deal with it one day
00:10:57 ►
at a time. Since nobody knows what it’s going to be, it seems that it is one of those areas which in sociology is known as the area of self-fulfilling
00:11:07 ►
prophecy if people have a definite belief about what the future is going to be that tends to
00:11:13 ►
produce that type of future on the individual level if you decide i can’t pass the examination
00:11:18 ►
you won’t study why bother studying if you know you can’t pass so that’ll be a self-fulfilling
00:11:23 ►
prophecy you’ll fail the examination if you think they wouldn’t pass? So that’ll be a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’ll fail the examination.
00:11:26 ►
If you think they wouldn’t hire me for a job like that,
00:11:28 ►
you won’t go in for the job interview.
00:11:30 ►
On the other hand, somebody who thinks I’m just right for that job
00:11:33 ►
and I’ll make them realize it goes in and gets the job.
00:11:36 ►
So a great many things are created by self-fulfilling prophecies.
00:11:39 ►
So I think the Club of Rome, by creating this prophecy
00:11:42 ►
that the whole of civilization is going to collapse in ten years
00:11:45 ►
and we’re going to be wrecked and we’ll have no energy and we’ll be back in the dark ages,
00:11:49 ►
they have created a momentum which can very well lead to that conclusion.
00:11:53 ►
I think by the same token, the kind of optimistic future scenario that I’ve been outlining can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:12:01 ►
If a lot of people think, yeah, I would like to live indefinitely,
00:12:06 ►
maybe you’re not ready for immortality yet maybe the thought is metaphysically staggering but if you’re thinking
00:12:10 ►
i’d like to live a couple of hundred years i don’t want to die when i’m only 70 just starting
00:12:14 ►
to figure things out and you think yeah i would like to get smarter and yes i would like to travel
00:12:20 ►
across galaxies like captain kirk if you get excited by visions like that, and if enough people get excited by visions like that,
00:12:26 ►
and if you see far off ahead of those visions
00:12:29 ►
the evolution to cosmic immortality,
00:12:32 ►
then that too can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:12:35 ►
It may have been innate in evolution from the beginning,
00:12:38 ►
or it may just have been invented by Nietzsche
00:12:40 ►
and a few other philosophers since Nietzsche,
00:12:43 ►
but it is possible.
00:12:45 ►
And the more people who are excited about it and believe in it and put their energy in it,
00:12:49 ►
the more likely it is to happen.
00:13:02 ►
I think at this point I will have a question period.
00:13:06 ►
I wish some of the fundamentalists showed up tonight.
00:13:10 ►
They could announce that this is Satan that you hear speaking to you.
00:13:13 ►
This is obviously an anti-Christian message.
00:13:15 ►
It doesn’t say anything about hell, sin, damnation, doom, or anything like that.
00:13:20 ►
So I must be serving the dark one.
00:13:22 ►
But they’re not here.
00:13:23 ►
Is there anybody else who has any interesting objections to raise to this kind of fantasy? Does anybody have
00:13:31 ►
any questions then? Yes?
00:13:33 ►
It seems to me that some of the apparent increase in lifespan is actually caused by the reduction
00:13:40 ►
in child mortality. What is the actual change in lifespan of people who reach the age of 10 from then on?
00:13:47 ►
Because, you know, there was a time when something like 6 out of 10 kids died before they reached the age of 5,
00:13:52 ►
and it’s no longer around.
00:13:53 ►
Yeah, but that is part of the explanation of the average life expectancy increasing,
00:13:58 ►
but it’s not the whole explanation because if you read books about, say, the 18th century,
00:14:05 ►
you will see that not only were a lot of kids dying very young,
00:14:07 ►
but people were dying in their 20s all the time
00:14:09 ►
because smallpox came around every couple of years,
00:14:12 ►
and that killed off about half the population.
00:14:15 ►
Then they’d start to recover, and back would come the smallpox again
00:14:18 ►
or another type of plague, cholera or one thing or another.
00:14:22 ►
And in the 19th century, you find the same thing.
00:14:24 ►
You find people are getting knocked off in their 30s by. And in the 19th century, you find the same thing. You find people
00:14:25 ►
are getting knocked off in their 30s by the pollution in the rivers of England is poisoning
00:14:30 ►
whole towns and so on. So it’s not just infant mortality. There was high mortality between
00:14:36 ►
zero and 10 and between 10 and 20 and between 20 and 30 and between 30 and 40. And hardly anybody
00:14:43 ►
survived beyond 40 some
00:14:45 ►
did but there are always a few lucky few with superior genes or extra good luck
00:14:49 ►
or something so you do find cases of 70 80 90 year old people in earlier epics
00:14:56 ►
but you don’t find them at the same rate even in recent years we find the number of people over 100 in England in 1976 was 300.
00:15:07 ►
In 1986, it’s 3,000.
00:15:11 ►
And you wouldn’t find earlier in history people like George Burns
00:15:19 ►
doing comedy acts at the age of 80 and so on.
00:15:24 ►
So it’s more than just the decline in infant mortality.
00:15:27 ►
There’s been a decline in death at all ages.
00:15:31 ►
Next question.
00:15:33 ►
Do you see a significant impact on the pendulum swing of conservatism and liberalism?
00:15:40 ►
I mean, conservative people now are sort of started with something gone and acquiring another. How does that affect your vision of the future? well I think these pendulum swings are
00:15:52 ►
kind of local and short lived
00:15:54 ►
if you look at the pattern
00:15:58 ►
that I’ve been talking about the doubling of knowledge
00:16:00 ►
if you look at history from 1750 to the present
00:16:04 ►
you’ve got these pendulum
00:16:05 ►
swings of liberalism and conservatism, but the overall pattern has been one of increasing
00:16:11 ►
lifespan, increasing literacy throughout the Western world, and then throughout the third
00:16:16 ►
world, too, in the last couple of decades, and increasing optimism through most parts of the
00:16:22 ►
population. Surveys show that Americans have very little faith in their government these days,
00:16:28 ►
and people who only register that, who only ask that question in polls,
00:16:32 ►
say, well, everybody is cynical and disillusioned.
00:16:35 ►
But then if you ask people what they think about their own lives,
00:16:38 ►
it turns out in polls over and over that people are more optimistic
00:16:42 ►
than they’ve ever been at any period of taking polls in the past.
00:16:45 ►
More people are more confident about their own ability to solve their own problems and make a good life for themselves.
00:16:51 ►
So I think the general, if you look from 1750 to the present,
00:16:55 ►
all these local conservative backswings are only a minor part of the melody.
00:17:00 ►
The general tendency is like Beethoven’s Ninth.
00:17:02 ►
It’s moving higher and higher and louder and louder and faster and faster.
00:17:08 ►
And each conservative backswing is less conservative than the previous conservative backswing.
00:17:14 ►
Ronald Reagan is not nearly as conservative as the conservatives we had in the 1930s.
00:17:19 ►
He has never attempted to abolish Social Security.
00:17:22 ►
He has never attempted to return to pure isolationism.
00:17:25 ►
Just read the polemics written by Republican conservatives in the 1930s
00:17:33 ►
and compare them with Ronald Reagan’s type of conservatism.
00:17:36 ►
Nobody really wants to go back to the conservatism of the past.
00:17:40 ►
It really is dead.
00:17:43 ►
Next question.
00:17:41 ►
it really is dead next question
00:17:44 ►
do you think this
00:17:47 ►
giant ancient spirit
00:17:48 ►
that keeps people on the quest for power
00:17:51 ►
is what has brought
00:17:52 ►
so much of the destructive tendencies
00:17:55 ►
into humanity
00:17:56 ►
and so much of the violence into the world
00:17:59 ►
do you believe
00:18:01 ►
there is that destructive tendency
00:18:03 ►
in human nature
00:18:04 ►
or that it’s just a matter of choice?
00:18:08 ►
The Dionysian, quoting, bringing in the Dionysian idea from Nietzsche,
00:18:15 ►
the Dionysian, the way Nietzsche uses Dionysian, it means ecstatic,
00:18:21 ►
as distinguished from Apollonian, which is rational.
00:18:24 ►
It means ecstatic, as distinguished from Apollonian, which is rational.
00:18:30 ►
And if you read Nietzsche carefully, what he’s basically trying to describe in those poetic metaphors are what we nowadays think of as linear left-brain thinking, which is the Apollonian,
00:18:36 ►
and right-brain holistic thinking, which is the Dionysian.
00:18:40 ►
And I think if you look at history as a whole, you you find that both of them are subject to perversion
00:18:46 ►
especially when they become ruling class ideologies
00:18:50 ►
so you find some really nasty Apollonian type civilizations
00:18:54 ►
and some really nasty Dionysian type civilizations
00:18:57 ►
and you find some very good civilizations of both of those types too
00:19:02 ►
so I don’t think you can draw a line and say the Dionysian is good and the Apollonian is bad,
00:19:07 ►
or the Apollonian is good and the Dionysian is bad.
00:19:10 ►
These seem to be part of a dialectic, both of which are necessary for our evolution as I see it.
00:19:16 ►
Is that quite what you were asking?
00:19:19 ►
Oh, good.
00:19:20 ►
Next question.
00:19:21 ►
You mentioned the information age, and I’m curious, what’s life after the information age like?
00:19:30 ►
Maybe you can talk about the genetic and quantum explosions.
00:19:36 ►
Well, yeah, what comes after the information age?
00:19:40 ►
That’s the kind of question that has perplexed me a lot in the last ten years. When I start projecting forward
00:19:46 ►
the scientific breakthroughs that I feel fairly confident about, when I reach about the year 2004, my mind goes blank.
00:19:54 ►
I can’t imagine what happens beyond a certain point. Things are moving so fast that it gets harder and harder.
00:20:03 ►
You reach a point where it seems that
00:20:05 ►
all the utopian fantasies of the past are going to come true.
00:20:08 ►
That is assuming we don’t screw things up and really wreck the planet first.
00:20:13 ►
And what happens after that?
00:20:15 ►
This is the kind of question I keep wondering about.
00:20:17 ►
Obviously, one of the things that’s going to happen is that we’re going to have genetic
00:20:22 ►
engineering, whether people, whether conservatives object to it or not it’s an interesting field for
00:20:28 ►
research the possibilities are enormous I think one thing that might happen is
00:20:32 ►
if it turns out that we cannot extend human lifespan beyond a certain point
00:20:37 ►
let’s say we can double it to 140 triple it to
00:20:42 ►
the raise it to 400 but it can’t go beyond that.
00:20:46 ►
And everybody finds out definitely there’s no gimmicks,
00:20:51 ►
there’s no ways of getting around it.
00:20:52 ►
400 years is human lifespan.
00:20:54 ►
That’s all we can have.
00:20:55 ►
Then the next thing will be, well, let’s genetically engineer
00:20:58 ►
a new type of human being who can live longer than that.
00:21:01 ►
And that will be our gift to our posterity,
00:21:04 ►
to give them an indefinitely
00:21:05 ►
long lifespan. NIFAS has to remain limited. And that’s the kind of genetic engineering
00:21:10 ►
experiments I’m sure are going to be done. And in quantum physics, I have a very strong hunch
00:21:18 ►
based on conversations with physicists and teaching seminars with physicists in various places
00:21:26 ►
we are very soon
00:21:28 ►
going to learn how to access the zero
00:21:30 ►
point energy and the
00:21:32 ►
zero point energy is
00:21:33 ►
derived from Heisenberg’s
00:21:36 ►
equations and it seems
00:21:38 ►
that when we find a way
00:21:40 ►
to access the zero point energy
00:21:41 ►
we will have so
00:21:43 ►
damn much energy that everything that’s happened in previous history
00:21:47 ►
will seem picky-yoon by comparison.
00:21:49 ►
One physicist I know named Jack Sarfati
00:21:52 ►
has calculated that when we access the zero-point energy,
00:21:57 ►
we will be able to extract from one cubic centimeter,
00:22:00 ►
one cubic centimeter, tiny little bit,
00:22:03 ►
of pure vacuum.
00:22:04 ►
We’ll be able to extract from that
00:22:06 ►
enough energy to run all the factories that now exist for the next 15 trillion trillion years.
00:22:14 ►
Now that’s a hell of a lot of energy. And if you got two cubic, if you got two cubic centimeters,
00:22:18 ►
you got twice as much energy as that. And we’ve got a lot more, we got hundreds of, we’ve got
00:22:23 ►
millions of cubic centimeters to work with. So I think we’re approaching the level where we’ll have so much
00:22:29 ►
energy that all the cries about an energy shortage of the 1970s will seem like a comedy in retrospect.
00:22:37 ►
Not only that, but leaving aside quantum matters, Bucky Fuller calculated in the 70s the known energies that we can access, not including
00:22:47 ►
zero-point energy and quantum mechanics, known energies that we can access. If you add them all
00:22:53 ►
up, it turns out that we’re now accessing less than one-fourth of a hundredth of one percent of all of those energies. 99.999975 percent of all the available energy on this planet is not being used at present,
00:23:13 ►
mostly because the people who have the economic clout
00:23:17 ►
can’t see a way to make a profit out of accessing those energies.
00:23:21 ►
Carl Hess has a solar-powered house in Virginia,
00:23:27 ►
but the monopolies keep putting ads in the papers and magazines telling us we can’t have solar power yet, it’ll take 40 years more of
00:23:31 ►
research. The reason they’re doing that is it will take 40 years more of research for them to figure
00:23:36 ►
out how to put a meter between the sun and us so they can charge us for it. And so most of the
00:23:42 ►
energy available is not being used yet. It will be used when
00:23:45 ►
the petroleum starts running out and people are really desperate. Yes, your question.
00:23:49 ►
I just want to comment on the Dionysian thing. It seems to me that the war bears had a great
00:23:57 ►
impact on our geography, because in 1919, the political one and two brought us into yeah that’s what’s known among mystics might reconcile more variable progress.
00:24:30 ►
Yeah, that’s what’s known among mystics as a dark saying.
00:24:35 ►
It’s kind of uncomfortable to think about those interconnections.
00:24:40 ►
I just touched on that briefly when I pointed out after the doubling of knowledge in 1750, we had all those revolutions, the American Revolution, the French Revolution,
00:24:44 ►
and all the subsequent revolutions. Those things Revolution, the French Revolution, and all the
00:24:45 ►
subsequent revolutions. Those things brought in a great new age of democracy, or as the Marxists
00:24:50 ►
would say, bourgeois democracy. But they brought in the Bill of Rights and a lot of civil liberties
00:24:55 ►
traditions I find very wonderful, and I’m very glad we got them. If you look what the world was
00:24:59 ►
like before we had those traditions, you wouldn’t want to go back there. And yet those revolutions all involve bloodshed.
00:25:06 ►
They all involve people killing one another.
00:25:09 ►
This is the dark side of history, and all I can say,
00:25:13 ►
I haven’t resolved that in my head philosophically yet.
00:25:15 ►
It’s a perpetual paradox to me, and that’s why there’s so much irony in my writings.
00:25:20 ►
The only thing I can say is what George Burns said,
00:25:23 ►
as God, in God too,
00:25:27 ►
when the little girl asks him why there are so many bad things in the world.
00:25:30 ►
He says, well, I still haven’t figured out a way to make something with only one side.
00:25:39 ►
Which is sort of the Taoist outlook. Yes?
00:25:41 ►
I have a question. I know you’ve written about political assassinations in this country.
00:25:47 ►
I wonder whether for you it’s more than a device for selling books.
00:25:51 ►
What is the significance for you having the average person look upon the way the time is expected?
00:26:13 ►
a device for selling books like all writers i am eager to sell my books but whenever people say do you do this just to sell books i get this weird feeling that jesus if i i wish i knew how to sell
00:26:19 ►
books i mean if i if i really knew how to sell books I’d be a lot richer than I am.
00:26:28 ►
No, I don’t do anything to sell books.
00:26:31 ►
I hope my books will sell, but while I’m writing the books,
00:26:37 ►
I’m carried along by other processes that involve the two sides of the brain working together in the conscious and the unconscious,
00:26:39 ►
and I never know what’s going to come out until it’s finished.
00:26:42 ►
That’s what’s known as the creative process.
00:26:45 ►
If you knew what you were doing, it wouldn’t be creative.
00:26:48 ►
It would just be rote work.
00:26:51 ►
One of the reasons I write about conspiracy so much is because I am interested in different levels of thinking.
00:27:00 ►
And I have observed that many people don’t know the difference between an
00:27:05 ►
assertion and an argument and so I have written my books using conspiracy theories and other gimmicks
00:27:12 ►
to make clear the difference between an assertion and an argument so that if you accept things as
00:27:18 ►
assertions and you turn the pages you find a little bit later they’re just assertions.
00:27:23 ►
There’s no evidence for them whatsoever.
00:27:26 ►
I would like the readers of my books to come out, if they read enough of them,
00:27:30 ►
with a clear idea of what’s an assertion and what’s an argument.
00:27:33 ►
And then beyond that, if they can see the difference between a legal argument
00:27:36 ►
and a philosophical argument, they will have gone a little further.
00:27:40 ►
And if they can see the difference between a scientific argument and a philosophical argument,
00:27:44 ►
they will have gone a little further and then when they can distinguish between a scientific proof a
00:27:49 ►
philosophical proof a legal proof and a bland assertion like god told me to tell you uh then
00:27:57 ►
then they then they will have achieved a certain increase in intelligence and i will feel proud of
00:28:03 ►
my work and that’s what I’m trying to do in
00:28:05 ►
bringing up controversial subjects, is teach people to look at controversial subjects in a clear way.
00:28:11 ►
As the, you know, professional conspiracy buffs, they put together 10 statements on a page. One of
00:28:18 ►
them may have some validity. The others are pure assertion. And they get away with this because
00:28:24 ►
most people don’t
00:28:25 ►
know how to tell an assertion from an argument. Every lawyer knows this. You get people in court
00:28:30 ►
and you try to restrict them to plain facts, and they think the judge and the lawyers are conspiring
00:28:35 ►
against them because they can’t insert all their prejudices into the record like they’re accustomed
00:28:39 ►
to doing in ordinary conversation. Not that the legal system is a model of clarity,
00:28:47 ►
but most people aren’t even equipped to deal with that.
00:28:50 ►
If they try to deal with scientific questions,
00:28:52 ►
they’d be even more aghast.
00:28:54 ►
Most people just have no concept of how foggy their own thinking is
00:28:56 ►
and how much emotionalism and prejudice
00:28:58 ►
is leading them around all the time.
00:29:01 ►
And I do find it appalling,
00:29:03 ►
a lot of conspiracy buffs take advantage of that.
00:29:07 ►
I lived through the McCarthy era, and one of my friends was in the 1960s accused of being
00:29:15 ►
involved in the Kennedy assassination, and he went crazy because of that. And I am a very firm
00:29:20 ►
believer in that part of the Old Testament which says, thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
00:29:27 ►
And I have a real repugnance for people who make wild and reckless charges.
00:29:31 ►
So that’s why I keep coming back to conspiracy theories.
00:29:35 ►
Next question.
00:29:35 ►
I have a question about what would you call the next step after the information age?
00:29:41 ►
And I would like to suggest that you call it the choice age, the age of choice,
00:29:48 ►
because we get to a point where our bodies
00:29:52 ►
aren’t that important and we’re able to just choose
00:29:53 ►
the reality that we want,
00:29:55 ►
so everything else becomes rather irrelevant.
00:29:59 ►
My second thing I wanted to say
00:30:01 ►
has to do with medicine.
00:30:04 ►
I’d like to talk about the future of medicine for a little while.
00:30:07 ►
Because I see a change in paradigm coming that has to do with medicine that is what we’re looking for.
00:30:17 ►
I was wondering if there was a chair up here.
00:30:24 ►
I’ll sit here
00:30:25 ►
my question was about
00:30:28 ►
medicine and health
00:30:31 ►
in the past doctors have
00:30:33 ►
tried to make us well
00:30:34 ►
and we’ve waited around for them to do that
00:30:36 ►
in the future I think we will just
00:30:38 ►
change our own lives and start
00:30:40 ►
approaching our own health
00:30:42 ►
and let doctors just
00:30:43 ►
go do their own thing?
00:30:46 ►
Well, my first comment on that is, as I said earlier, scientists are human beings too.
00:30:55 ►
And I think one of the most important things that’s happening at present is scientists are learning that they’re human beings
00:31:00 ►
and are learning to see more clearly how their prejudices can deceive them too.
00:31:05 ►
It doesn’t just happen to lay people. And I think a classic example of that is the fact that homeopathic
00:31:11 ►
medicine in this country has virtually been extinguished. You can hardly find homeopathic
00:31:16 ►
physicians. People who go to homeopathic physicians are regarded as eccentric or desperate or something
00:31:22 ►
like that. And yet in England, homeopathic medicine is just as respectable as allopathic medicine,
00:31:28 ►
the kind of medicine we have here.
00:31:31 ►
Why is it in one country you have one type of medicine, allopathic,
00:31:36 ►
and in England you’ve got a choice.
00:31:37 ►
You can use either allopathic or homeopathic, and it’s not considered weird.
00:31:41 ►
This happens to be a historical accident.
00:31:44 ►
It happened because the royal family happened to believe in homeopathic medicine,
00:31:48 ►
so the allopathic doctors could not conspire to make that look like a crank movement
00:31:53 ►
and drive it underground as they did with homeopathic medicine here.
00:31:57 ►
And the same thing is happening.
00:31:58 ►
For years we believed the Orient was backwards compared to us,
00:32:02 ►
so nobody studied Chinese medicine.
00:32:04 ►
Now acupuncture and many other types of Chinese medicine are becoming better known.
00:32:09 ►
So I think as far as the paradigm changing, the change has already started to happen,
00:32:14 ►
and it’s going to happen faster.
00:32:17 ►
People are getting more open-minded and more willing to try alternatives,
00:32:21 ►
and that’s going to force the medical profession itself to become more open-minded
00:32:25 ►
or they’re going to lose more and more clients.
00:32:27 ►
More and more people tend to go to herbalists or body workers or postural integration therapists
00:32:38 ►
or try alternatives, and it quite often makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, I am a bitter opponent
00:32:46 ►
of either-or thinking and easy dichotomies. If A is right, B must be wrong. I don’t like that
00:32:53 ►
kind of thinking at all. I think there’s a great deal of value in orthodox American medicine.
00:32:59 ►
I think people who never go to an MD, maybe running serious risks.
00:33:07 ►
I’m in favor of trying everything and see what works best.
00:33:12 ►
I think that’s really the emerging paradigm is open-mindedness rather than saying either this or that.
00:33:15 ►
We used to believe in this, now we won’t believe any of it.
00:33:17 ►
We’ll try the exact opposite.
00:33:19 ►
The universe doesn’t seem to work that way.
00:33:21 ►
Generally, the truth turns out to be not either a or B
00:33:25 ►
but something that transcends both a and B and includes them I think Hegel
00:33:29 ►
noticed that before me actually that’s the dialectic next question yes in general, that the risk of sounding like a Marxist, do you think that these life extension techniques will be made available to common people?
00:33:55 ►
I don’t see anything wrong with sounding like a Marxist.
00:33:58 ►
I often sound like a Marxist myself.
00:34:01 ►
My attitude is use every reality tunnel where it’s useful. I find Marxism very useful
00:34:07 ►
in analyzing a lot of phenomena. I find Freudianism very useful, too. I use whatever model seems best
00:34:14 ►
for each case. I find most cases I understand a lot more if I look at it through four models
00:34:19 ►
instead of just through one. And I generally use the Marxist model as one of my four for thinking of most
00:34:25 ►
things. But your question is what I think Marx would have called vulgar Marxism. Pardon me.
00:34:33 ►
Marx did coin that phrase himself. There is an assumption in there that they will keep something
00:34:39 ►
away from us. That is based on the idea that they are smarter than us. I don’t accept that. I regard
00:34:47 ►
myself and my friends as the real power elite. I don’t think anybody is smarter than us or going
00:34:53 ►
to get anywhere faster than us. And so I don’t worry about those mighty figures who are tougher
00:34:59 ►
and smarter and shrewder and are going to keep everything to themselves, because I just think I
00:35:04 ►
happen to know the smartest scientists on the planet. And I’m going to hear about life extension before most
00:35:09 ►
people do. And I’m going to spread the word as fast as I can. Meanwhile, I think that field will
00:35:14 ►
turn out to be very much like automobiles or computers or most other things in modern technology.
00:35:19 ►
Henry Ford was the first one to discover you make a hell of a lot more by making cheap cars and
00:35:24 ►
selling them to everybody than you do by making cheap cars and selling them to everybody
00:35:25 ►
than you do by making expensive cars and selling them only to millionaires.
00:35:30 ►
And that’s why there are so many cheap computers around now, because that knowledge is spread beyond the automobile industry.
00:35:36 ►
As soon as life extension technology is achieved in a laboratory, the next thing they’ll do is find out how cheap they can sell it.
00:35:44 ►
in a laboratory, the next thing they’ll do is find out how cheap they can sell it.
00:35:48 ►
Because you make a lot more by selling to 8 billion people on the planet than you’ll make by selling it to 20 billionaires.
00:35:52 ►
And so I’m not really worried about that scenario.
00:35:54 ►
Yes?
00:35:55 ►
I have some problem with any notion of death at all.
00:35:59 ►
In fact, I’m trying to think of everybody as us.
00:36:03 ►
Yes, I agree, absolutely.
00:36:05 ►
I think we should think of the human race as one family.
00:36:08 ►
I just happen to think that my particular section is the smartest part of the family, but that’s…
00:36:14 ►
Yes?
00:36:17 ►
Given what you said about political stupidity and about the information age that’s coming up,
00:36:23 ►
can any kind of political structure or lead to survival of the upcoming information exposure?
00:36:29 ►
I don’t think so.
00:36:30 ►
I think they’re all going to collapse.
00:36:33 ►
I don’t know what’s going to replace them.
00:36:34 ►
I’m still working on that problem.
00:36:36 ►
But it seems to me every existing political system and every existing political theory
00:36:41 ►
is based on assumptions that are, well, some of them go back 2,000 years,
00:36:46 ►
some of them go back 6,000 years, some of them go back to when America was an agricultural
00:36:50 ►
nation before the invention of the automobile.
00:36:53 ►
There are hardly any political theories that are contemporary with 1986.
00:36:58 ►
The people who are trying to think of a political theory contemporary with 1986 like Marilyn Ferguson and F.M.S.
00:37:09 ►
Fandieri, come up with wild scenarios which I don’t think are going to be anything like
00:37:17 ►
what will emerge.
00:37:18 ►
I think what will emerge will be a synergetic product that astonishes all of us.
00:37:23 ►
But it will be much more libertarian than anything we’ve had in the past
00:37:26 ►
for two reasons.
00:37:28 ►
People are getting more literate all over the world.
00:37:31 ►
No, more than two reasons.
00:37:32 ►
Literacy is spreading faster and faster.
00:37:35 ►
There are more and more university graduates everywhere.
00:37:38 ►
It’s happening, you know,
00:37:39 ►
in the United States,
00:37:40 ►
4% were university graduates in 1900.
00:37:43 ►
Now it’s around 60 percent.
00:37:48 ►
And the same thing is happening in the rest of the world at a slower rate.
00:37:53 ►
Literacy is spreading into all the parts of the third world where everybody was illiterate 20 years ago.
00:37:55 ►
You’ve got increasing literacy.
00:37:59 ►
So we’re getting more and more literacy, more and more education, more and more communication. And at the same time, these Jeffersonian 18th century ideas are getting around more and more.
00:38:05 ►
And the consciousness revolution, modern psychology, the I squared function, learning how to change your own nervous system is getting around more and more.
00:38:14 ►
So you’re getting more and more people who demand the right to choose and demand options and choices and demand not to be given orders all the time.
00:38:23 ►
And so I think the authoritarian structures will find it harder and harder to govern the people of the future.
00:38:30 ►
They just won’t know how to control the population of the year 2010.
00:38:37 ►
By 2010, I think the human race will be ungovernable.
00:38:41 ►
At the point where government breaks down the only alternative to chaos
00:38:45 ►
is intelligent negotiation
00:38:47 ►
and if you look up the entry
00:38:49 ►
under my name and who’s who
00:38:50 ►
when nowadays they allow you to add a philosophical
00:38:53 ►
comment after your biography
00:38:55 ►
my philosophical comment is
00:38:57 ►
let us all study the art of negotiation
00:38:59 ►
I think that’s the most important
00:39:01 ►
art to learn for the future
00:39:03 ►
because less and less will be decided by force,
00:39:06 ►
more and more will be decided by negotiation,
00:39:09 ►
and we should all learn to be good negotiators.
00:39:13 ►
Next question.
00:39:14 ►
What do you see going along with this that don’t keep them from blowing us up?
00:39:21 ►
Well, I think what has kept them them if we must talk that way
00:39:25 ►
what has kept them from blowing us up
00:39:27 ►
is John von Neumann
00:39:30 ►
John von Neumann
00:39:33 ►
designed the first programmable computer
00:39:36 ►
and then he invented game theory
00:39:38 ►
mathematical game theory
00:39:40 ►
which he then showed could be applied to war games
00:39:42 ►
and I think the reason we’re here tonight, the reason there’s life on Earth 41 years after Hiroshima,
00:39:54 ►
is because both sides in the Cold War keep running their favorite scenarios through their computers.
00:40:00 ►
Can we beat them with this technique?
00:40:03 ►
And the computers, which are not politically prejudiced or partisan, play out the war game and say,
00:40:09 ►
no, you can’t beat them with that technique.
00:40:11 ►
With that technique, you’ll get trashed too.
00:40:13 ►
So then they go back to the drawing board and calculate for another five years,
00:40:17 ►
how can we get the jump on them?
00:40:19 ►
And they feed this to the computers, and the computers say, no, that way you will not win either.
00:40:23 ►
That way you will be killed along with them. And that’s we’re still here and i think that’s what’s keeping us
00:40:29 ►
alive uh the more they analyze war games with scientific techniques the more they realize what
00:40:35 ►
einstein and bertrand russell and all 12 intelligent people on the planet realized in 1945
00:40:42 ►
which is that there are no winners in a nuclear war.
00:40:46 ►
I think that message will eventually get through, and I even suspect that it is beginning to
00:40:50 ►
get through.
00:40:51 ►
I think some of the recent negotiations at Geneva show a slight sense that they’re not
00:40:55 ►
faking so much, that they are looking for it.
00:40:58 ►
They are trying to learn how to negotiate with each other instead of just bluff each
00:41:02 ►
other.
00:41:03 ►
Maybe.
00:41:04 ►
Maybe I’m being over-optimistic. I’m often accused of that.
00:41:07 ►
Next question.
00:41:08 ►
Do you know what’s happened to the software that Timothy Leary has co-authored?
00:41:13 ►
He said last year…
00:41:14 ►
Yeah, I heard it would be out in November.
00:41:18 ►
The latest news I heard was that it would be out in March.
00:41:20 ►
This is March 1st.
00:41:22 ►
Keep inquiring at your computer store. That’s all I can say.
00:41:26 ►
What was the other question?
00:41:31 ►
I don’t know about that.
00:41:33 ►
I haven’t heard about that.
00:41:33 ►
I saw a great tarot deck by Salvador Dali recently, though.
00:41:37 ►
Any of you who are into collecting tarot decks,
00:41:40 ►
some people do that as a hobby,
00:41:41 ►
make sure you get the Dali deck.
00:41:43 ►
It’s one of the most mind-blowing.
00:41:46 ►
And I’m not being paid a commission by the Salvador Dali estate.
00:41:50 ►
That’s an unsolicited testimonial.
00:41:52 ►
Next question.
00:41:53 ►
Do you have any thoughts on the Hopi prophecies?
00:41:58 ►
The Hopi prophecies?
00:41:59 ►
No, I don’t know.
00:42:00 ►
I don’t know. One, we have disrupted a basic order by taking rocks from the moon
00:42:08 ►
and then we are doomed and thus we return them to the moon.
00:42:11 ►
And the other is,
00:42:12 ►
the container full of nests will fall from the sky and cause the oceans to boil.
00:42:19 ►
Well, I don’t know.
00:42:21 ►
I don’t know anything about the Hopi prophecies.
00:42:26 ►
I’m not even very good at Nostradamus.
00:42:28 ►
I read Nostradamus and I can’t make head or tail out of it.
00:42:31 ►
I can’t tell whether he’s right or wrong.
00:42:34 ►
And that type of thing seems to fall into the area of assertion that I was talking about before.
00:42:40 ►
It has nothing to do with argument, legal, philosophical, scientific, or any type of
00:42:46 ►
argument I recognize. It’s just assertion. An assertion can come true. If I assert I am going
00:42:53 ►
to leave here and have a drink very soon, I can make that assertion come true, but that’s not an
00:42:57 ►
argument. And, you know, an assertion can come true, but nobody knows until it does come true.
00:43:03 ►
I may decide not to leave here and have a drink.
00:43:05 ►
I may decide to leave here and have a cup of coffee.
00:43:09 ►
Assertions you can’t say anything about.
00:43:11 ►
It’s a question of take it or leave it.
00:43:13 ►
You can’t prove them or disprove them.
00:43:16 ►
So I don’t know.
00:43:17 ►
I’ll see.
00:43:22 ►
I don’t know.
00:43:27 ►
I asked them last night, would they please come to the Denver lecture too
00:43:31 ►
and bring all their friends.
00:43:33 ►
I said, if you can get a bigger demonstration,
00:43:35 ►
I’d get more publicity and sell more books,
00:43:37 ►
and I’d be very grateful to you.
00:43:39 ►
And I think that may have discouraged them.
00:43:41 ►
I think their goal is not to help me sell books,
00:43:43 ►
so they decided to boycott me instead.
00:43:46 ►
That’s the trouble with being honest, you see.
00:43:48 ►
You always end up screwing yourself that way.
00:43:51 ►
I should have told them,
00:43:52 ►
please don’t come to Denver.
00:43:53 ►
I’m terrified.
00:43:54 ►
If you expose me, I’ll lose all my fans.
00:43:56 ►
And then they would have showed up with…
00:43:58 ►
Then they would have got all their friends together
00:44:00 ►
and they would have had a big enough demonstration
00:44:01 ►
to get on television.
00:44:05 ►
Next question. Yes, back there.
00:44:07 ►
How do you answer those people who say that it’s premature for us to spend so much on space exploration
00:44:14 ►
when we really haven’t learned how to live on the planet yet,
00:44:16 ►
in terms of desertification and microplasms and more and more species becoming extinct?
00:44:34 ►
Well, I don’t think, I think that’s based on a false dichotomy. We’ve already, I mean, we’ve already got part of our technology in outer space right now.
00:44:39 ►
And the idea that leaving the planet means leaving the planet is oversimplified.
00:44:45 ►
How many people are going to leave the planet perpetually?
00:44:48 ►
I think in the next 40 years, a lot of people will be living and working in space part-time,
00:44:53 ►
but they’ll probably return to the planet.
00:44:55 ►
The idea that it’s like saying, why leave Europe and go to the United States on a lecture tour?
00:45:02 ►
Shouldn’t you solve the problems of Europe first?
00:45:07 ►
I do everything I can to solve the problems of Europe. I lecture wherever they ask me to lecture over there. But I don’t
00:45:12 ►
feel I’m deserting Europe when I spend a few weeks visiting the United States. I don’t think Europe
00:45:17 ►
and the United States are that far separate. They’re part of one system. And I don’t think
00:45:22 ►
Earth is that separate from the rest of the solar system. It’s part of one system. And I don’t think Earth is that separate from the rest of the solar system. It’s part of one system.
00:45:27 ►
And the idea that leaving Earth means abandoning Earth,
00:45:30 ►
actually leaving Earth to use interplanetary technology
00:45:35 ►
will benefit Earth tremendously by bringing us cheaper power, more power.
00:45:40 ►
In Colorado, you’ve got all the sunlight you need for solar power,
00:45:43 ►
but in a place like Ireland, solar power is totally a lost cause there
00:45:49 ►
because it’s damp and rainy most of the year.
00:45:52 ►
But Ireland can have as much solar power as Colorado if it’s beamed down from outer space.
00:45:58 ►
And I really think that the surface of a planet is not the best place for a growing technology.
00:46:08 ►
Technology gets increasingly risky and it should be moved away from human beings.
00:46:13 ►
If we’ve got to have it on this planet, which I don’t think we do,
00:46:17 ►
but if we did have to keep technology on this planet,
00:46:20 ►
I think there should be laws that the people who own the factories have to live within half a block of the factories.
00:46:27 ►
I think if everybody who owns shares in atomic energy plants had to live in a circle around the atomic energy plants,
00:46:34 ►
then they might be a lot more careful.
00:46:37 ►
But meanwhile, I think it’s much safer to move heavy technology off the planet entirely.
00:46:42 ►
And that would give the planet a chance to become one great big nature park you’re listening to the psychedelic salon where
00:46:50 ►
people are changing their lives one thought at a time well where to start
00:46:58 ►
huh there was a lot of ground cover just, so it’s hard to decide what to comment on first.
00:47:06 ►
For example, I was intrigued by his comment about zero-point energy.
00:47:11 ►
And while that is a subject that doesn’t quite fit in our normal discussions here in the salon,
00:47:16 ►
I do want to note that the field of unlocking some of the laws of physics dealing with dark energy has become very exciting lately.
00:47:23 ►
physics dealing with dark energy has become very exciting lately.
00:47:29 ►
And if this is a topic you want to learn more about, a good place to begin is obviously Wikipedia, where you can find quite a few external resources and links about that subject.
00:47:36 ►
But one of the most important things you can do right now, that is if you’re interested
00:47:41 ►
in living a little longer than the 66 or so years that is the current world average lifespan.
00:47:48 ►
And that kind of stops me in my track because I’m 66 now, so I guess I’ve already lived the average current world lifespan.
00:47:56 ►
But anyhow, for you, a good thing to do would be to begin paying attention to what is going on with the International Codex Commission,
00:48:04 ►
which is, of course, being enforced by the good old World Trade Organization. paying attention to what is going on with the International Codex Commission, which
00:48:05 ►
is, of course, being enforced by the good old World Trade Organization.
00:48:10 ►
And unless you’ve been on another planet for the last few years, you’ve most likely heard
00:48:15 ►
about the soon-to-be-enforced ban on all vitamin and mineral food supplements.
00:48:21 ►
Now, while I still find it hard to believe that these knuckleheads are actually
00:48:25 ►
going to let the regulations go into effect at the end of next year, nothing can surprise me
00:48:31 ►
much anymore. And why should you worry about the availability of food supplements, you might ask?
00:48:38 ►
Well, one reason is that recent studies have shown that the average nutrient value for most fruits and vegetables found in U.S. supermarkets
00:48:46 ►
has gone down by over 50% since the middle of the last century.
00:48:52 ►
And while modern agriculture is good at producing large quantities of food,
00:48:56 ►
it isn’t very good at raising food that contains all of the vitamins and other nutrients required for long and healthy lives.
00:49:04 ►
all of the vitamins and other nutrients required for long and healthy lives.
00:49:11 ►
Now, I’m sure that I’m not the only one who remembers the time back when MDMA was still legal.
00:49:14 ►
But back then, we all knew that it would soon be banned.
00:49:18 ►
And so those were great times for ecstasy dealers because everybody was stocking up on it before the ban became effective.
00:49:22 ►
So maybe it would be wise to begin stocking up on vitamin D, B, C, and a few other supplements
00:49:29 ►
that will be critical for anyone who wants to extend their normal lifespan like Bob Wilson
00:49:35 ►
was just talking about.
00:49:36 ►
At least the psychedelic community shouldn’t be very deeply affected by this ban because
00:49:41 ►
heck, we’ve been buying our pharmaceuticals from the underground all of our lives.
00:49:46 ►
In other words, we won’t be needing to go to blackmarketvitamins.com because we’ve already got our connections.
00:49:54 ►
So don’t be surprised in a few years when the U.S. News is reporting on an outbreak of street dealers selling vitamin C to school children.
00:50:03 ►
You may be laughing at that statement, but be careful that you aren’t laughing too soon.
00:50:08 ►
And just in case, maybe you should start looking for your underground vitamin connection now
00:50:14 ►
before they are added to the list of beneficial substances that the screwheads in Washington
00:50:19 ►
and in our state capitals want to keep away from you.
00:50:23 ►
For your own good, of course.
00:50:22 ►
and our state capitals want to keep away from you.
00:50:24 ►
For your own good, of course.
00:50:27 ►
And maybe also for the good of the pharmaceutical companies who are bribing our politicians night and day.
00:50:31 ►
Okay, that’s the end of my political rant, at least for today.
00:50:36 ►
I guess good old Bob Wilson got me going when he was talking about a Club of Rome prophecy
00:50:40 ►
that said everything was going to hell in a handbasket.
00:50:44 ►
And although this talk was recorded in the mid-1980s, it now appears that he got his
00:50:49 ►
facts correct, but was just a little off on timing.
00:50:52 ►
Timing, you know, is everything.
00:50:55 ►
And several of our fellow salonners over the past year or so have offered to give our notes
00:51:01 ►
from the Psychedelic Salon blog a more modern look and feel.
00:51:04 ►
offered to give our notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog a more modern look and feel.
00:51:11 ►
And I’ve visited most of the example sites you all have sent me to give me an idea of what they can do to help,
00:51:17 ►
but I have to admit that every one of them looked a lot better than our current site does.
00:51:25 ►
But for right now, the timing isn’t just right, because even though I wouldn’t have to do much to help upgrade the design,
00:51:30 ►
it still would take some of my time, and that’s the only thing I’ve run low on lately.
00:51:36 ►
I’m already behind on my deadline of finishing my new book by the end of November, and until that project is completed, I just can’t undertake anything else, including email, I’m afraid.
00:51:43 ►
So until I get this little six-year-long project finished,
00:51:46 ►
I’m not going to have the time to do much else.
00:51:50 ►
And yes, I realize that I’m setting myself up in the event that no one likes my new book,
00:51:55 ►
but that’s not why I’m writing it.
00:51:57 ►
So I hope you all understand how much I appreciate your offers to help with the website,
00:52:02 ►
and I do plan on getting back to this project sometime next
00:52:05 ►
year. Hopefully my filing system will hold together long enough to be able to find your offers to help
00:52:11 ►
when the time comes, but please know that I am very appreciative of your offers.
00:52:17 ►
Now, one last thing I want to touch on, and it’s something we haven’t talked about much here,
00:52:22 ►
but I know it’s of interest to many of our fellow salonners
00:52:25 ►
because you also listened to my friend KMO on his Sea Realm podcast,
00:52:31 ►
which in my humble opinion are among the best interview programs around on any media.
00:52:37 ►
The topic is the possibility of a technological singularity,
00:52:40 ►
and there’s a conference dealing with that topic that some of our fellow
00:52:45 ►
salonners might be interested in.
00:52:47 ►
So let me just read a short announcement about what is called the Singularity Summit, and
00:52:53 ►
it’s going to be held on October 25th from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Montgomery Theater
00:53:01 ►
in San Jose, California.
00:53:03 ►
And their announcement says,
00:53:05 ►
Throughout the past half century, the field of artificial intelligence, AI, has been progressing steadily.
00:53:13 ►
As progress continues, it is likely that the problem-solving abilities of AI systems
00:53:18 ►
will approach and then surpass the brightest human minds.
00:53:22 ►
So, if so, it is also likely these symptoms will acquire the ability to improve their
00:53:28 ►
own programming without human assistance.
00:53:30 ►
The development of such systems should be approached with considerable forethought.
00:53:36 ►
The prospects and implications of powerful machine intelligence has been called a singularity
00:53:41 ►
by analogy to singularities in mathematical physics, particularly black holes.
00:53:47 ►
This analogy invokes the concept of the event horizon
00:53:50 ►
that shields the singularity from outside observation.
00:53:53 ►
This point of view is informed by the notion that
00:53:56 ►
it is difficult for us to predict what will be done by intellects
00:54:00 ►
that exceed our own mental ability.
00:54:03 ►
We consider it plausible that advanced AI systems may arrive in the next few decades, Thank you. the chief technical officer of Intel, the co-founder of PayPal,
00:54:50 ►
and, of course, Werner Wenge, who is not only a renowned science fiction author,
00:54:56 ►
he’s also the originator in 1993 of the concept of a technological singularity.
00:54:59 ►
And the announcement goes on to say,
00:55:03 ►
The Singularity Summit is the premier dialogue on the singularity. The first Singularity Summit was held at Stanford University in 2006
00:55:07 ►
to further understanding and discussion about the singularity concept
00:55:11 ►
and the future of human technological progress.
00:55:15 ►
It was founded as a venue for leading thinkers to explore the subject,
00:55:19 ►
whether scientist, enthusiast, or skeptic.
00:55:23 ►
Since 2006, the scope of this dialogue has expanded dramatically.
00:55:27 ►
In 2008, the singularity now has entered mainstream consideration.
00:55:32 ►
IEEE Spectrum, a sober and mainstream technology publication, issued a special report on the subject.
00:55:40 ►
And Intel Chief Technical Officer Justin Ratner remarked that we’re making steady progress toward the singularity
00:55:46 ►
during his keynote to 2,000 people at the Intel Developer Forum.
00:55:51 ►
What was once a relatively unknown concept
00:55:54 ►
is now being discussed in corporate boardrooms.
00:55:58 ►
And you can learn more about this conference at www.singinst.org. Maybe there’ll be a recording or two that comes
00:56:11 ►
out of this conference that either KMO or I can play for you later this year. But in any event,
00:56:16 ►
I hope someone who attends it will tell us about the highlights. I have mixed emotions when it
00:56:22 ►
comes to this topic. I guess you could call me an undecided, although Werner Wenge would call me a gradualist.
00:56:30 ►
Of course, Werner thinks that Ray Kurzweil is a gradualist, too.
00:56:36 ►
So that should give you an idea of the level of discourse to expect among this interesting group of speakers who will be together on that day.
00:56:44 ►
among this interesting group of speakers who will be together on that day.
00:56:51 ►
And now, as always, I’ll close this podcast by saying that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are available for your use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
00:56:58 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
00:57:04 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org. Thank you.